eeble, sunken, and almost blind, and scarcely able to read or
write. He uttered his farewell with kindly emotion, and I feared
that the next I should hear of him would be the news of his
death. Two years later he began a Universal History, which is
not without traces of weakness, but which, composed after the age
of 83, and carried, in seventeen volumes, far into the Middle
Ages, brings to a close the most astonishing career in literature.

His course had been determined, in early life, by Quentin
Durward. The shock of the discovery that Scott's Lewis the
Eleventh was inconsistent with the original in Commynes made him
resolve that his object thenceforth should be above all things to
follow, without swerving, and in stern subordination and
surrender, the lead of his authorities. He decided effectually
to repress the poet, the patriot, the religious or political
partisan, to sustain no cause, to banish himself from his books,
and to write nothing that would gratify his own feelings or
disclose his private convictions #66. When a strenuous divine, who,
like him, had written on the Reformation, hailed him as a
comrade, Ranke repelled his advances. "You," he said, "are in the
first place a Christian: I am in the first place a historian.
There is a gulf between us." #67 He was the first eminent writer who
exhibited what Michelet calls _le desinteressement des morts_. It
was a moral triumph for him when he could refrain from judging,
show that much might be said on both sides, and leave the rest to
Providence #68. He would have felt sympathy with the two famous
London physicians of our day, of whom it is told that they could
not make up their minds on a case and reported dubiously. The
head of the family insisted on a positive opinion. They answered
that they were unable to give one, but he might easily find fifty
doctors who could.

Niebuhr had pointed out that chroniclers who wrote before the
invention of printing generally copied one predecessor at a time,
and knew little about sifting or combining authorities. The
suggestion became luminous in Ranke's hands, and with his light
and dexterous touch he scrutinised and dissected the principal
historians, from Machiavelli to the _Memoires d'un Homme d'Etat_,
with a rigour never before applied to moderns. But whilst
Niebuhr dismissed the traditional story, replacing it with a
construction of his own, it was Ranke's mission to preserve, not
to undermine, and to s